Following recent telecommunications mergers, local (mostly municipal and county) governments and the federal government are fighting over who should determine whether cable television systems must make their facilities available to unaffiliated providers of high-speed (“broadband”) Internet...

We examine the suggestion that if consumers in sufficient numbers are willing to pay the premium to have power generated using low-emission technologies, tax or permit policies become less necessary or stringent. While there are implementation difficulties with this proposal, our purpose is more...

Jurisdictions have overlapping authority regarding electricity restructuring when a national authority and subnational regional governments—for example, states—both have a say. The initial sections of the paper review the division of regulatory authority over electricity markets in the...

Reserve requirements in electricity markets may get each producer to internalize the cost of grid-wide blackouts it might cause if unable to meet consumer demand. Markets for how such capacity might be procured have been studied. Less examined is how the costs of reserve capacity are covered....

Competition policy has become more prominent while the thinking underlying those policies has undergone substantial revision. We survey advances in antitrust economics and the economics of regulation. Increasing reliance on non-cooperative game theory as a foundation for antitrust has led to...

Restructuring the electricity market may secure efficiencies by moving away from cost-of-service regulation, with typically (but not necessarily) time-invariant prices, and allowing prices to reflect how costs change. Charging "real time" prices requires that electricity use be measured...

Lower prices for polluting goods will increase their sales and the pollution that results from their production or use. Conventional intuition suggests that this relationship implies a greater need for environmental policy when prices of "dirty" goods fall. But the economic inefficiency...

Widespread concern over transmission capacity requires theoretical support to infer inadequacy from observed trends indicating reductions in the ratio of transmission to generation capacity over time. If integrated utilities had been regulated with allowed returns exceeding capital costs,...

We review economic models of environmental protection and regulatory enforcement to highlight several attributes that are particularly likely to benefit from new enforcement technologies such as remote sensing using satellites in space. These attributes include the quantity and quality of...

Demand-side management programs comprise subsidies from franchised electric utilities for the purchase of high-efficiency appliances, e.g., air conditioners. Competition in power generation threatens the viability of these programs. However, it should also reduce the warrant for them. Under...